How was your New Year’s celebration last night? Are you feeling the after effects today? This is because the body converts alcohol into acetaldehyde, a toxic chemical that causes headaches and other side effects of drinking to excess. According to the Royal Society of Chemistry, the way to lessen the effects of a hangover is to have some toast and honey, not raw eggs or more alcohol or other remedies;

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued three documents on the safety of animal cloning — a draft risk assessment; a proposed risk management plan; and a draft guidance for industry.

The draft risk assessment finds that meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals. The assessment was peer-reviewed by a group of independent scientific experts in cloning and animal health. They agreed with the methods FDA used to evaluate the data and the conclusions set out in the document.

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The proposed plan outlines measures that FDA might take to address the risks that cloning poses to animals involved in the cloning process. These risks all have been observed in other assisted reproductive technologies currently in use in common agricultural practices.

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In the draft guidance, FDA does not recommend any special measures relating to human food use of offspring of clones of any species. Because of their cost and rarity, clones will be used as are any other elite breeding stock — to pass on naturally-occurring, desirable traits such as disease resistance and higher quality meat to production herds. Because clones will be used primarily for breeding, almost all of the food that comes from the cloning process is expected to be from sexually-reproduced offspring and descendents of clones, and not the clones themselves.

Jake already wrote what I wanted to write, but here it is in a nutshell:

Meat and Milk safety

Meat is meat. Milk is milk. Beef of any other name is still beef.

Cloned animals are not the same as genetically-modified animals. First, cloned animals are NOT identical to their parents. Second, there is no insertion of non-cow (or non-sheep, non-pig, etc) genes into these animals - no danger of aflatoxin, or peanut genes that can trigger allergies. Every protein in the steak of a cloned cow is still a typical cow protein. If you can normally eat beef, you can also eat cloned beef - there is NO chemical difference.

Ethics

Cloning animals can teach us a lot about genetics and development of animals with, probably, some practical applications down the line. I see no need - and apparently farmers don’t either - for mass production of cloned animals. Only animals targeted to be cloned will be champion breeders. And there is no way that Thorougbred racehorses will ever be cloned - even assisted fertilization (i.e., artificial insemination) is illegal (i.e, the animal will not be included in the Stud Book). So, only a few champion breeders from a couple of species (cows, I guess, perhaps sheep and pigs) will be cloned. This is good - to keep this at a minimum, at least for now - as the process of cloning produces a lot of sickly offspring, which raises ethical questions in itself.

Agricultural practice

We already have a virtual monoculture in both plant and animal production for food. Such lack of genetic variation is troublesome as a new diesase (or global warming) may quickly sweep through our herds and deplete our food supply very fast. Making the gene pool even more homogenous in order to raise the meat/milk productivity of our animals just a little bit does not, in my opinion, warrant a widespread use of cloning of domesticated animals. I’d rather support small farmers who purposefully keep rare, unusual breeds of animals like Old-TypeOldenburg horse, Curly Bashkir pony or Mangalitza pig - breeds that contain genes absent from our current gene pool of mass-produced animals and provide a reservoir of useful traits we may need in the future.

We’ve got conflicting chronologies: a young earth history that is virtually all relatively recent human history, and a scientifically accurate one that encompasses 4.5 billion years of geological and biological change. How to reconcile them? Well, if we just divide everything in geology and biology by about a million and splice it together with modern history, we get this vastly entertaining timeline. Here’s a sample:

A.D. 1066: William the Conqueror invades England by walking through northern France.

On Thursday (January 18th) we will have a teach-in session. About 20 people have signed up so far. We’ll use Wordpress to help them start their own blogs, so I’ll have to make one of my own in advance and play around to figure out the platform before I teach others.

On Friday (January 19th), we’ll have dinner and all the bloggers present will read their posts. We have not decided on the place yet, but perhaps a site that has wifi, or a screen and a projector would be good as the posts can be seen as well as heard.

On Saturday (January 20th), we’ll have a busy program. We have two speakers: a scientist - Hunt Willard (director of the Duke Insitute for Genome Sciences & Policy) and a science blogger - Janet Stemwedel (Adventures in Ethics And Science).

Then, we’ll have four (or five) break-out sessions in an Unconference format - the participants take the lead and the leaders guide and moderate.

We decided not to have these sessions cover different areas of science, but different ways blogs, podcasts and other internet technologies can be used: a) research (e.g., using a blog as a public lab-notebook, online publishing), b) teaching (using the online technologies in the classroom), c) popularization of science (how to blog well, including the importance of visual props - illustration) and d) informing the public (e.g., public health, medicine, countering un-scientific forces in the society, etc. perhaps broken into wo sessions: one on science, one on medicine and public health). We have lined up four excellent people to moderate these sessions (not everything is on the wiki-page yet but will be soon).

Afterwards, we will go to dinner. If you have registered already, or plan to register soon, please do not forget to sign up for one of the dinners. Just edit the wiki and enter your name where you want.

At this moment we have 109 people registered for the conference. Some locals will probably sign up at the last minute. Some of the people coming from very far away may still be waiting for good deals on plane tickets before they sign up. If you are considering this, it would be good if you could sign up as soon as possible so we have a good idea how many people to plan for in terms of space, food, swag, etc.

If you browse through the list of registrants, you will see what a great diversity of people there will be, a potential for cross-fertilization leading to high hybrid vigor! There are people from four continents coming to Chapel Hill in January to meet with us, as well as people from a number of States. There are science, medical and technology bloggers, web-designers, research scientists working in academia, government and industry, physicians, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, even high school students. There will be editors of science and medical journals and magazines, journalism professors and students, local journalists, and science writers. There will be science teachers at all levels - elementary, middle, high school and college. There will be local elected officials, and staff of state departments. And, I hope, you will be there as well!

We have attracted quite a lot of cool sponsors for the conference, so you can excpect some really good stuff in your swag bags! Still, both Antonand I are quite bad at begging for money. We do need a little bit more - can you or your organization be a sponsor, or donor, or host? If so, let Anton know as soon as possible.

And we may just be able to pull it off to have the Anthology ready to be distributed at the conference.